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Happy Hallow-Christmas-een

I love Halloween - pumpkins, trick or treat, kids in funny costumes, adults in risqué outfits, a pot of stew warming on the stove, glowing candles, conkers, table settings in glorious Autumn colours – I just can’t get enough of it! Yet Halloween celebrations are now totally subsumed by Christmas hype.

Selfridges opened its Christmas shop as far back as the beginning of August. Even my village gift shop had Christmas decorations on sale well before Halloween this year. There was a good reason for this though; the heavily pregnant owner thought she’d better get them out quickly before her baby arrived. It felt right to buy them, given the effort it must have taken her. And they do tend to sell quickly, right?

Of course I gave myself a metaphorical ticking off the moment I got home. I hadn’t even got past Guy Fawkes night - fireworks, yeh! - and already I was in full Christmas mode. But it’s hard to juggle all these festive occasions when they overlap. And you certainly wouldn’t want to muddle them up because that’s when tragic mistakes happen. Nobody wants to see Santa on the bonfire. So I’ve come up with a solution.

Let's keep Christmas ticking over all year round and save ourselves a lot of hassle. The upside is that we’d never have to pack away the decorations. Or take down our outdoor lights although some people (you know who you are) can’t be arsed doing this even now. And we wouldn’t have to turn the attic and garage upside down the following year trying to find them again.

The downside is that we’d all be living in a garish Noel nightmare where ‘catchy’ Christmas songs play in a continuous loop, supermarket shelves constantly run out of bread but heave with surplus mince pies, we have dinner with our feuding families over and over and pretend to love it all even though we’re permanently bloated from eating rich food and groggy from guzzling too much booze.